Riffstation Launches Play to Detect and Display Chords for Youtube Music Videos

Riffstation has launched a beta app with some lofty goals. Play is designed to present chords for any Youtube music video, in real time.

The software has a super clean and simple interface, which shows promise. And while bass isn’t listed in the app, following the guitar chords should be suitable for most songs. (The app supports guitar, ukulele (!) and piano).

Riffstation says they’ve developed “an automatic chord recognition algorithm to ‘listen’ to the music and figure out the chords for you.” In many of the songs I’ve reviewed, there were errors. But to be fair, this is clearly a beta product and the company says the “algorithm detects major, minor and 7th triads with about 85% accuracy in typical rock/pop music.” They say they have plans to allow users to edit chords in the future.

The Play web app is free, and you can create an account to save your favorites to a song book. If the chords are not available for a particular song, you can click a button to have the software generate them.

The company’s Riffstation app is listed as the “pro edition“, available for Mac and PC. The desktop app allows you to load any song from your music collection to detect the chords, plus giving you the ability to slow down and pitch shift the music as well as isolate or mute the guitar.